Scholar Unearths Oldest Christian Church

RALEIGH, N.C. — It was an astonishing piece of luck. Following a hunch, professor Thomas Parker went looking for an ancient Roman trading port and dug up what may be the oldest known Christian church.

Other structures converted to churches are older than the two-story mud-brick building that Parker found in Aqaba, Jordan, a Red Sea resort city 210 miles south of Amman. Parker’s discovery, however, is the oldest building known to exist that was erected solely as a Christian worshipping place, he said.

Built around AD 290 or 300 by early Christians, the church somehow survived the “Great Persecution,” when the Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered churches razed and Christians tortured between 303 and 311. The church may have been spared because it lay on the empire’s southeastern periphery, Parker said. It was destroyed by a cataclysmic earthquake in 363 and buried by the desert.

Parker, 48, on the North Carolina State University history faculty since 1980, became interested in Aqaba and its predecessor, the ancient Roman port of Aila, when he shifted his scholarly research from Roman military history to Roman economy. He found himself in the middle of a debate about how big a role trade played.

“We didn’t go to Aqaba to find the oldest church in the world, but to find evidence of Roman economic activity,” he said. “The discovery of the church was an unexpected bonus.”

Ancient historical texts suggested Aila’s likely location in present-day Aqaba, which lies at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, an arm of the Red Sea. Parker and his wife walked the area in 1993 after examining old British Royal Air Force aerial photos. They found pottery shards that encouraged them to return in 1994.

That year, he and his 50-person expedition found Aila in the middle of a thriving port city that was undergoing a construction boom.

“It was serendipity that we started when we did,” Parker said of the expedition’s timing. “We could have lost a major historic site.”

“Looking back, it was an incredible crapshoot,” he added.

Upon returning with another expedition in 1996, Parker found the first evidence of the buried church, but he was cautious initially. Only when his crew last summer excavated the apse on the eastern end of the building did he become confident enough to consider announcing his findings. “It was the last piece of the puzzle that told me we had a persuasive case,” he said.

“It wasn’t until we had the complete plan, the complete chronological sequence before I started sticking my neck out,” Parker said.

The church, 28 yards by 16 yards and with five aisles, wasn’t especially large or ornate. “There were no beautiful accouterments, no marble, as in the later churches. It was a very functional church for a middling-sized congregation” of no more than a few hundred, he said.

He said four lines of evidence support his belief the church was Christian and dated to 290 or 300.

* It is oriented to the East, as were all early churches.

* It was laid out in a basilica plan, with a nave, apse, chancel and aisles.

* There is an adjacent cemetery. One of the 25 graves exhumed yielded an arm of a brass cross.

* It was illuminated with glass oil lamps filled with olive oil, which were not found in residences of that time. The lamps, pottery and chandeliers all conform to a construction date of about AD 300, he said.

“I don’t see what else it could be,” he concluded.

Seven stone risers from a staircase indicate the church had a second story, Parker said.

About 100 coins from the 4th century were found scattered about a small room, near a charred box, possibly a collection box that burned when the earthquake destroyed the church, Parker said.

He plans to return with another team in 2000 and spend the interim year sifting through the three tons of artifacts that he brought back.

Parker said additional digging may yield firmer evidence of the church’s construction date. For example, black-and-red paint flecks on bits of excavated plaster provide hope a better fresco might be found in still-buried parts of the church.

He said Aqaba, Jordan’s only major port, is fast becoming a major tourist attraction and a major hotel-building program is in progress. Jordanian officials were quick to grasp that the ruins he is excavating will only draw more tourists and have cooperated in preserving the site.

“If we can show off the oldest church in the world, it would enhance the economy, it would perform a cultural service and fulfill an economic need,” Parker said.

Sawsan Fakhiri, director of the Aqaba Antiquities Department, earlier said the ruins very likely are remains of a church built in the late 3rd century, but said more study is needed. Other historians have reacted with similar restraint, with some holding out for an inscription or artifacts firmly placing the structure in the 3rd century.

Older churches than the one in Aila exist, but they all were homes converted to that purpose. One in Dura Luropos in Syria dates to about 230 A.D., said Parker. It went out of use when Persians captured the city in 256.

After Diocletian’s anti-Christian crusade, it wasn’t long before the Roman Empire became Christian and more churches went up, sanctioned by the imperial government.

Constantine, the first Christian emperor, gained control of both halves of the empire in 324, and his mother, Helena, embarked on a church-building campaign the next year. Some of the most famous structures from that era remain open today--for example, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.